This title is misleading, should be closer to "Government frequently adopts anti-patterns when maintaining software" Something more constrained to what the article is actually about rather that the global catch all "software maintenance".
This is closely linked to the idea that least cost development is a matter of doing every individual action 'cheaply' and pretending you are not going to screw things up. If you want least cost actually least risk is a good approximation.
Undoubtedly, the audience of this article is software developers and managers of software projects within governemnt. Therefore, although the title doesn't convey the article's message to outsiders, it might not actually be misleading.